Live Feed: Building a Better Fishtrap

Paloma McGregor’s iterative performance project, Building a Better Fishtrap, is rooted in the reclamation of her 91-year-old father’s vanishing fishing tradition. The work centers on three central questions that arise when you leave your ancestral home: What do you take with you? Leave behind? Return to reclaim?

In Phase 2, a solo work commissioned by Brooklyn Arts Exchange in 2016, McGregor enacts a ritual of remembering, both kaleidoscopic and intimate, through three distinct worlds. The work “commands its audience receive and witness with the same stamina the soloist McGregor rigorously expels,” reflected Ni’Ja Whitson in InfiniteBody. “The doing in this work is its magic. And McGregor does both the subtle and grand with such intention, the magic hypnotizes.”

In her June 2017 Live Feed showing at New York Live Arts, McGregor is sharing the process and early discoveries revealed during a 10-day workshop with Fishtrap collaborators. This is the first stage of development for the thrid major installment of the Fishtrap project, a community-engaged iteration that will premiere on the Bronx River in July 2018, supported by MAP Fund. www.angelaspulse.org